Extermination camp facts for kids

Mass deportations: the routes to the death camps

Extermination camps were special places built by Nazi Germany during World War II. They are also called death camps. The main goal of these camps was to kill millions of people very quickly.

Most people were murdered using poison gas in special gas chambers. But the Nazis also killed people in other cruel ways. They performed mass executions, like shooting many people at once. They also killed people through "extermination through labor". This meant forcing prisoners to do extremely hard work. These prisoners received almost no food, medical care, or other basic things they needed to survive. Many people also died from starvation, illness, and freezing to death.

The Nazis sent many different groups of people to these death camps. However, about 90% of the people killed were Jewish. Nazi Germany had a terrible plan to kill all Jewish people. This plan was called the Final Solution. Today, we know this horrific event as the Holocaust.

Hiding the Evidence of Camps

When the Nazis realized they were losing World War II, they tried to hide their terrible actions. They wanted to destroy all evidence of the millions of people they had killed. This meant they needed to destroy the camps themselves. They also tried to hide the bodies of their many victims.

The Nazis forced prisoners to help destroy the camps. They also made them burn records and dig up mass graves. This was an attempt to erase the proof of their war crimes.

Camps are Freed

Some extermination camps were liberated by Soviet soldiers. This happened before the Nazis could destroy all the evidence. For example, the Majdanek camp was captured almost wikt:intact. The Soviet Red Army reached the camp very quickly. This stopped the Nazi SS guards from destroying most of it.

Related pages

• The Holocaust
• The Final Solution
• Nazi concentration camps
• World War II
• War crimes

Images for kids

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  Jewish children during deportation to the Chełmno extermination camp

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  New arrivals walk toward the gas chambers at Birkenau, May 1944. (From the Auschwitz Album)

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  Former Sonderkommando 1005 slave laborers next to a bone crushing machine at the Janowska concentration camp (August 1944)

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  A Reichsbahn consignment note for delivering prisoners (Häftlinge) to Sobibór in November 1943

See also

In Spanish: Campo de exterminio para niños